I want to spotlight one presentation in particular today. David Bateman, of K&L Gates spoke on policing bad behavior on the internet. (He had such a peppy, positive attitude about the law’s ability to "get the bad guys." It was endearing. He reminded me of a superhero—The Cyber Avenger.)

Everyone reading this blog is much more sophisticated about technology than any of the attorneys present at the seminar (myself included), so I’m not going to waste time describing the technology. However, I am going to review some case studies that he presented and how the law is going about dealing with these issues.

You may ask yourself, "This is not my industry. Why do I care about spam and fraud?"

Spamming, Phishing, Vishing, and other types of on-line fraud increase consumer skepticism and lower click-through rates and conversions. Consumer attitudes towards online advertisements may negatively impact the viability of the digital marketing industry. If consumers become increasingly ad blind and refrain from clicking on ads, the growth of the industry may be prematurely stunted.

There is some very interesting discussion following a recent post by Danah Boyd (my hero!) regarding click-through rates and search engine marketing. She was reviewing the results of an AOL study showing that less than 1% of internet users click on ads on a monthly basis. Of the 1% who do, less than two tenths of one percent click more often than once per month. The AOL study also exposed who is doing most of the clicking. Apparently, the promise of the digital marketing industry is being born by older, housewives from the Mid-West. Huh.

Boyd further hypothesizes that the heavy-clickers on social networking sites are probably of lower income, lower education, and more likely to meet new people through social networking sites.

Why is this a big deal? Well, there is a risk that SEM will not blossom into the industry it seems destined to become if users (especially users with disposable incomes) remain click shy. Sophisticated users won’t become true participants in online marketing until the world wide web loses its wild wild west qualities. Thus, increasing the integrity of the system is necessary to allow the industry to maximize its potential.

There have been some interesting and important decisions in 2007 regarding social networking sites and online advertising. Anti-spam legislation (Can-Spam anyone?) has been in place for several years, but it was unclear whether the courts would be willing to apply these laws to social networking sites. It was also unclear whether the courts would be willing to protect the ad revenue value proposition from seemingly innocuous, but parasitic businesses. Let’s take a look at how courts have been handling these cases.

MySpace.com vs. The Globe.com

For those of you who don’t follow lawsuits (and I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t), The Globe.com used phony MySpace accounts to send unsolicited commercial "MySpace e-messages" to MySpacers. The Globe.com allegedly went crazy nuts and sent over 400,000 messages from 95 dummy MySpace accounts. Realizing that it had to protect its value proposition and user experience, MySpace filed suit against The Globe, alleging violations of federal and state anti-spam laws and violations of its Terms of Service (hereafter sometimes referred to as “TOS”).

The Globe.com tried to win “on a technicality” by arguing that MySpace couldn’t claim violations of the anti-spam laws because MySpace isn’t an Internet Access Provider and “e-messages” aren’t the same thing as “electronic messages.” The honorable Judge Klausner didn’t buy these arguments, however. The Judge ruled that MySpace is an IAP and an e-message is the same thing as an electronic message. The Court also found that The Globe violated MySpace’s terms of service and that the damages provision requiring a penalty of $50.00 per forbidden message was reasonable. Thus, The Globe.com was ordered to pay $5.5 million in damages for abusing the social network to circulate spam. (Note: After the judge made this decision, the parties reached a private, agreed settlement of their disputes. I assume that The Globe.com threatened to appeal to a higher court unless MySpace agreed to take a lesser sum.)

Facebook.com vs. ConnectU.com Facebook.com recently tried to stop a competitor, ConnectU.com, from harvesting email addresses from its website and other spammy tactics. The case is still pending, but Facebook has survived ConnectU.com’s initial attempts to get the case dismissed. Similar to the MySpace case above, ConnectU tried to argue that Facebook was not an Internet Access Provider and therefore couldn’t invoke the Federal anti-spam statute, Can-Spam. The Court disagreed and ruled that the case could proceed to trial because Facebook was allowed to invoke anti-spam statute to protect its social networking sites. The allegations that ConnectU.com breached Facebook’s Terms of Service were also allowed to proceed to trial. If you want to follow Facebook v. Connect U as it continues to develop, you can check out the docket here. Oh goody!

There are several take-away points to be harvested here. First, courts are willing to cast the anti-spam statute broadly to protect social network sites. Second, in order to protect your company against fraudsters and spammers, you should execute a top-notch Terms of Service or End User Agreements that include liquidated damages for unauthorized site usages. Essentially, you need a contract in place that clearly prohibits a site from being used by third parties for commercial purposes. Further, the contract should require the fraudster must pay at least $50.00 per unauthorized contact.

In the following two cases, courts have ruled in favor of a website’s ability to protect its ad-revenue business model from parasitic businesses.

Southwest Airlines v. Board First LLC (N.D. Tex 9/12/2007)

Board First LLC charged SW Airlines’ passengers $5.00 to log in for them and get an “A” boarding pass. The SW Airlines’ customers voluntarily permitted Board First to use their accounts to log in and perform this service on their behalf. Thus, this case is different from the social networking cases above because Board First’s purposes were not spammy, and were even permissive as far as the end user was concerned.

However, SW Airlines did not particularly care for the Board First business model because it prevented people from coming onto their website where they may have seen an ad for a rental car or hotel and clicked on it. Essentially, SW Airlines was able to demonstrate to the Judge that under the Terms of Service, no one but SW Airlines was permitted to use the site for commercial purposes and that it was entitled to insist that its users actually enter onto the site. After the Court ruled that Board First was required to stop conducting business for the duration of the case, BF simply gave up and ceded victory to SWA. Thus, the Courts were willing to apply Terms of Use agreements to prevent SWA from losing “valuable selling and advertising opportunities,” even when the users voluntarily relinquished their log in and account information.

Ticketmaster v. RMG Technologies (C.D. Cal. 10/16/2007)

Ticketmaster has very recently convinced a Court to protect its business model. RMG Technologies developed and employed a parasitic business model that allowed users to make thousands of automated ticket requests without the user having to visit the Ticketmaster website. RMG’s program gained access to hundreds of thousands of tickets by circumventing CAPTCHAs designed to keep automated systems from taking advantage of Ticketmaster’s platform.

Ticketmaster was successful in convincing the Court that RMG’s business violated its copyright. [Note: this is a slightly different strategy than employed above by the SNS, which relied on anti-spam statutes.] RMG’s servers contain cached Ticketmaster pages. These cached pages were unauthorized copies in violation of Ticketmaster’s copyright. Naturally, RMG cried fair use as a defense, but the court didn’t buy it. The Court said that RMG’s attorneys failed to argue anything about “The Four Factors” defining fair use (Doh! They forgot to ‘proof-up’ their argument!) and therefore could not win on that shell of an argument. Further, the Court stated that RMG violated Ticketmaster’s Terms of Service by using the Ticketmaster site for commercial purposes.

Finally, the court found that RMG violated Digital Millenium Copyright Act’s prohibition against circumventing digital rights software, such as CAPTCHA. Basically, this one was a slam dunk for Ticketmaster. If you want to read more about the case, I invite you to review the Court’s order regarding the temporary injunction.

These two cases should allay the fears of business owners who rely either wholly or in part on ad revenue. Courts are proving themselves willing to broadly interpret current laws and enforce Terms of Use in order to protect these business models. As we have seen above, this applies whether the defendant is a fraudster, a competitor, or a well-intentioned but misguided business person.

This week’s post is more about general trends in litigation and less about practical steps you can take in your business practices to reduce risk. I beg your indulgence as I take a moment to step back and look at how cyber law continues to evolve. I haven’t forgotten my promise to delve into some Trademark law.

About SarahBird —
Sarah is the CEO of Moz. She is happiest when creating inclusive environments for people to learn and do their best work. She spends her days spreading TAGFEE and making software that helps marketers understand and improve their inbound marketing efforts. Oh, and doing email. Lots of email.
She also enjoys cookies, her adorable son Jack, her handsome hubby Eric, binge reading, and walking down the street.

32 Comments

I'm actually bummed about BoardFirst losing, because it sounds like such an ingenious service, and it's really not harming anyone except Southwest.

But in the Ticketmaster case, I actually found myself siding with Ticketmaster, despite the fact that I HATE paying their "convenience" fees (what's convenient about a surcharge?). RMG clearly seemed to be harming individual fans who were trying to get tickets to their favorite events.

I always ask a follow up to Sarah - it's becoming a tradition. This week it's:

What's the difference between the cache (copyright violation) in the Ticketmaster case and the cache (presumably not a copyright violation) that the search engines do with pages and that your ISP does with pages (proxy servers) and that you do with pages when you view them offline / use a cache feature in your browser.

In terms of fair use, it seems to me that at least the Google one is hard to justify since it is an entire copy and clearly for commercial benefit (they'd struggle if they couldn't cache pages!).

As always, thanks for your pertient and acute questions. (You should consider law school.)

What's the difference between the cache (copyright violation) in the Ticketmaster case and the cache (presumably not a copyright violation) that the search engines do with pages and that your ISP does with pages (proxy servers) and that you do with pages when you view them offline / use a cache feature in your browser.In terms of fair use, it seems to me that at least the Google one is hard to justify since it is an entire copy and clearly for commercial benefit (they'd struggle if they couldn't cache pages!).

I love the questions surrounding copyright and Caching. Joe Dolson, Bill Slawski and I were exclaiming about these very issues on the last day of PubCon. (I totally out-geek all of you. Everyone else was having a drink and I was getting drunk on Law. Copyright law no less!)The courts are really struggling what to make of cached pages. On the one hand, technically, it is an obvious violation of copyright. After all, it is a tangible copy of someone else’s work. That’s pretty clear. But no one is really comfortable with that result. It feels like it shouldn’t be a violation for Google or your personal computer’s internal cache to store a cached copy of a website you’ve viewed before. But there are also times that a business is doing something you don’t like, such as RMG, and you’re not sure how to nail them, so you try and nail them for copyright infringement. (There are burden of proof and remedy reasons why you might try to squeeze or claim into the copyright mold.)

When looking at caching, courts have selectively upheld the “fair use” defense. Remember, sometimes its okay to infringe someone’s copyright, but only if its "fair use." In determining whether a use is considered “fair” courts look at four factors. I covered this in more detail in a previous post, but the short version is that courts look at (1) the purpose and character of the use (commercial or not? Transformative or mere reproduction?), (2) the nature of the copyrighted work (entertainment or science?), (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyright as a whole, and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. If you made it through this paragraph, you just learned the infamous “four factors” test.

In Ticketmaster v. RMG, the Court determined this particular use of cache was not fair use. I think the thing that the Court didn't like most about RMG is that rendered Ticketmaster superfluous to their target market. It was selling the same product, to the same target market, at a substantially higher price! This doesn’t fit well into the policy behind fair use which is something like “spreading knowledge and developing new ideas is good.” Zen.

Perfect 10 v. Google also involved a discussion of cached pages (well, actually pictures, but the principle is the exact same). In this case, Perfect 10 sued Google for allegedly infringing on Perfect 10's copyrighted photographs of nude models. (Google. You old rascal you.) You all know how this works better than I do, but in short Google’s cache copy could provide a user’s browser with valid directions to an infringing image. Basically, Perfect 10 was pissed because some sites were stealing good quality, full-sized images if its lovely ladies and Google was providing thumbnails in its search results. Obviously, these thumbnails were cached by Google.

The Court evaluating the Perfect 10 case looked at the four factors and concluded that Google’s use of thumbnails is “highly transformative,” meaning that they serve a very different function than the full-sized high quality photos. Um. This is awkward…Presumably the Court meant that you look at the full-sized high quality photos for the sheer pleasure and delight of nude ladies, but you look at the thumbnail as a short reference of whether you are on the right track to get to the original photo. (Query: Is the court genuinely naive about the use of thumbnails on the internet? or just faking it?) Google was “improving access to information on the Internet versus" rather then attempting "artistic expression.” The Court also noted that Google provided great service to the public.

The Court struggled with the fact that Google does make money by providing this service (money is a terrible taint in fair use cases). The Court noted with seeming chagrin that 46% of Google’s total revenues comes from Adsense, but then tossed up its hands and said they had no information about the amount attributable to sites that contain infringing content.[Query: Would the ruling be different if we could get a figure that 10% of Googles Adsense revenues come from infringing sites? 20%? 30%?]

The Court also acknowledged that by providing these thumbnails for free, Google was destroying Perfect 10’s market for cell-phone sized images. However, after giving a little speech about the “importance of analyzing fair use flexibly in light of new circumstances," the Court concluded that “[i]n this case, Google has put Perfect 10’s thumbnail images (along with millions of other thumbnail images) to a use fundamentally different than the use intended by Perfect 10. In doing so, Google has provided a significant benefit to the public. Weighing this significant transformative use against the unproven use of Google’s thumbnails for cell phone down loads, and considering the other fair use factors, all in light of the purpose of copyright, we conclude that Google’s use of Perfect 10’s thumbnails is fair use.”

Thus, sometimes cache is fair and sometimes not. It depends on who is using it and for what purpose. I’m inclined to say that caching is going to be fair use most of the time. And I understand that a website owner can actually opt-out of having their site cached, but that the default is in favor of caching. (Thanks Joe!) Legally speaking, I think Google could reduce its risk of possible infringement claims if the default was to opt-out of caching. That way, a website owner would be giving permission…a license to cache...when he pr she chose to opt-in.

However, Joe and Bill brought up a good point that this creates some access to technology issues. After all, presumably, most website owners would prefer the benefits that come with having their site cashed. Requiring owners to take action to opt-in is probably not realistic or fair. While I don’t have anything but gut feeling to base this on, I think most website owners are not that sophisticated. Thus, hand-holding seems appropriate. As the law stands now, a court must answer the question whether cache is infringement or fair use on a case-by-case basis.

Anyway, I’m sure hundred of thousands of teenage boys are thrilled with the Court’s decision in Perfect 10. That’s got to count for something, right? (If only there was some kind of “fair use” policy for speeding in the left lane. There should be. “Justified acceleration” or something...)

I hope I'm not going to wake up one morning to a bill in my email from you, Sarah. The depth of advice you repeatedly offer here is unbelievable. That comment alone would count as a week's worth of blog posts in many places.

I am going to read properly and digest, but thank you.

On the law school issue, I did actually consider that kind of route way back at school - I *love* arguing. But I decided I'm too much of a techie at heart. Need my hit of maths.

Quick follow-up - (first let me say I agree with your analysis and background arguments for why caching should generally be a-ok) - image -> thumbnail is clearly transformative and so you can make an argument that is ok. The caching of text is far less clear to me - that is pretty much an exact copy of a page. I can see why it needs to be ok to do (there is a lot of value in google being allowed to exist, even though they make lots of money off it).

To me, though it fails the four factor test: 1. it's commercial (basis of Google's business), 2. it's not entertainment, science or education etc. 3. it's the entire work (whole website, every page), 4. there are clearly cases where it can impact on the value of the copyrighted work - even if it is only people seeing pages wrapped in Google branding.

I would like to add that I don't *want* to see it branded copyright infringement. We cache lots of things (not getting into too many specifics) and I like using Google, I just think the law could do with being clear on what is and isn't ok.

Sarah, thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed response. I'm with Will (and I'm SHOCKED that "only" 46% of Google's revenue comes from Adwords). There's still plenty of commercial intent there...

I think Google should perhaps be required to institute a link in the footer of their homepage that says "Instructions for avoiding caching of your content" that tells webmasters how to implement a NOCACHE tag. I agree that opt-in is unrealistic, but opt-out could be made MUCH easier.

Search engines could do more to let website owners make their preferences about caching clear, even if the default remains opting-in to caching.

I think doing this would help to limit any exposure Google may face. Athough, perhaps it doesn't feel like it needs to limit its exposure since the 9th circuit court practically went down on google. (can I say that? I'll probably regret it later.)

My mind is telling me that a search engine's policy of mass caching, especially text, is a clear violation of copyright and not justified as a fair use. But I don't like this result.

Thus, I'm going to give a run-down on Google's best strategies for avoiding a finding of copyright infringement:

1. Google's business plan actually does go a long way towards fulfilling the goals of copyright (furthering of information and development of knowledge.) I don't know about you, but I'm an information junkie. And while the information on the net isn't always accurate, it's still useful for refining my views and thoughts on things. Thus, I think that factor 2 weighs pretty heavily in favor of caching.

2. Factor 4 also tends towards allowing cached copies, but I'm not as technically savvy as the majority of Mozzers out there (I'm working on it and beg your patience.) It seems to me that the vast majority of the time, cached copies of your website adds value to your website. Doesn't it increase availability and improve functionality (in the sense that SEs can return their results faster--which is how most people are going to come to your website)? In my ignorance, it seems like a very rare situation when a search engines cached copy of your website would supercede the market created by the original version of your website. How frequent is it for you want someone to come to your original site (maybe your original site is ad driven), but Google sends them the cached copy instead. Isn't that usually only if your site has gone off-line for some reason? I'm asking for feed back on this because I'm sure you folks who actually own websites would have more knowledge and opinions on this than me.

3. And you know what I think a Court would say about Factor 1? I think they would say that even though Google is a successful for-profit business, caching is fair use because Google is not in the business of providing cached copies of websites. After all, we all go to Google to get relevant links to original websites. We're looking for the original up to date site. While caching helps Google provide speedy, quality searches, I don't think Google would be nearly as popular if its business was to provide cached webpages. Thus, a court may find the use of cached pages to be transformative because the context and purpose of the copies is so different from the original context and purpose.

We know that the 9th Circuit is came to the conclusion that an exact copy can still be transformative if it is serving a different function than the original. For the most part, Google's purpose for caching pages (i.e. improving search efficiency) is much different than the website owner's purpose (i.e. publishing content).

These reasons, combined with the Ninth Circuit's obvious crush on Google, lead me to believe that the Court would probably bend over backwards to find that a search engine's use of cached pages, even text, is fair use.

Regardless, the law is going to have to do some pretty fancy twirls and backflips to reach a satisfying result on these issues.

Thanks so much for your comment and your willingness to really engage the material!

Perhaps the problem is that Google do provide cached copies for users. I am a big fan of HTML versions of .pdf files and PowerPoint style presentations, but I find it hard to see where reformatting and presenting content outside of the authors' domain could be considered fair use.

Translation services aside, I cannot see the argument for providing public access to the cache as falling on sympathetic ears in a mainland European court. Essentially Google are simply publishing a scraper site.

I like the idea of more easily defined opt-out guidelines. The likes of Metallica managed to exclude spiders with their robots.txt file, but most webmasters do not understand the difference between crawling and indexing.

The morass of user-agent served robots files available at webmasterworld.com show just how badly these things can be implemented ;)

Took me a while to get round to reading this update (didn't touch a computer for ages over Christmas amazingly). Insightful as always.

Your comments make sense the and the transformative nature of the purpose of the copy seems plausible even if the copy is exact - I can follow that argument.

Regarding your technical question, you are right that it is rare that the cached copy could compete with the original - the only example I can think of is a cloaked site where a site might let googlebot in to index content that is normally behind a registration area for users - then a non-logged-in user could use the google cache to reach the page without logging in. This would be considered 'bad' by google, but could happen accidentally, I suppose - by requiring registration for internet explorer users only for example. In this case, the cached copy could compete with the original.

It's good to know that the purpose can be important - seems sensible.

I know nothing about the ninth circuit, but you have created all kinds of images in my head with this comment and the one above...

It might be comforting to think so, but as at 18 December 2007, Spamhaus puts the US as the originating country for more spam than any other nation, in fact the US accounts for more current known spam issues than the rest of the top 10 countries put together.

Given the relative sizes of our nations, I am not saying that the UK has much to be proud of in fourth place, but most spam does come from countries with well developed internet communities.

I'm curious what you think would have happened if Board First (or one of the other defendants) was based outside of the US? What actions could Southwest have taken to shut down BoardFirst?

Great Question Dave. If Board First was outside of the U.S., I think that Ticketmaster would still have been able to bring suit in a U.S. Court. Here's why:

When deciding whether it has a jurisdiction, the Court is going to ask itself questions such as, "Where are the parties located?" "Where did the bad/infringing act take place?" "Where is most of the evidence located?" "Where is the target market located?"

Because Ticketmaster is a U.S.-based company....They target U.S.-based customers on their website...the 'harm' is best likely to be considered to be located in the U.S. (the 'harm' in this case being monetary damage to Ticketmaster's business)...The only facts that would weigh towards not allowing jurisdiction are the out-of-country location of the defendant and perhaps the out-of-country location of the defendant's server.

Remembering that judges are really making a gut decision after looking at these questions, I imagine that U.S. judge would feel protective of the U.S. business. I also think that the Court would find that Board First "purposefully availed itself" of U.S. markets and therefore Board First shouldn't be surprised to be hauled into U.S. courts. if you want the benefits of our market, then you need to be prepared to follow U.S. laws.

One thing which does seem apparent in many, many cases heard concerning our industry, from Belgian rulings on Google News and German and British rulings on GMail, right through to minor copyright rulings, is that there seems to be an over dependence on existing precedents in traditional media and a lack of emphasis on industry expertise.

What we see, as a result of this, is plaintiffs making claims which, for anyone with any in depth knowledge of how the internet and, more specifically, the World Wide Web works, have gaping holes in them, but which sound reasonable to the layman.

This doesn't seem to have become such a problem in the UK, but certainly there are plenty of cases in both the US and Europe, where quite absurd ruling have been made, either in favour of the wealthier party or, and these generally seem more obvious, in a knee jerk reaction for the underdog, seemingly without any recourse being made to any real experts.

Trademark law is, perhaps, a different matter, but we seem to have seen too many examples of copyright law being applied to caches, feed providers and search engines inappropriately.

I would love to see spam wiped out, but where the line is drawn, when it comes to litigious action, needs to be more obvious.

indeed - I bought that very fact up in a meeting about captcha's yesterday - previous to this article I was aware of the "free p0rn enter the following captcha" method but not the mass production method - wonder if anyone's been "legit" or plain sneaky ;) enough to use amazons mechanical turk for it?

Still as Rand suggested in a question about Captcha's - make them relevant to the user - and if its say a site about "fishing" ask them a "fishing" question and the anonymous captcha enterer will be stumped!

scary though on the hannah montana... glad i've no idea who she is! actually my pop knowledge is rubbish occasionally - had to ask shakin stevens who he was when i was introduced a while ago...

1) I think Rand sending you t this conference, sending someone else to the ecommerce one a while back and I'm sure other conferences IDK about is a great business building and awareness strategy. Smooth moves you guys!

2) I like the arguments about caring about fraud, spam etc. That said, I know a spammer whose spam leads to affiliate sales of a non-spammy product (suffice it to say it's not pills, porn or gambling). So some spam actually increases market efficiency, imho. But email spam and such like the Myspace case obviously DN work out too well.

3) I have to question AOL's findings. It seems astonishing that the sector - and search engine revenues - can grow as they are off of less than 1% of people's use. What happened to the 80-20 rule? Even if you want to say it's a long-tail type distribution instead, I can't see that working out to -1% doing all that clicking.

4) On Boyd's hypothesis, I do have lower-income (I'm a student) but then again - I'm a law student in search. One way or another, the future looks good :). I don't buy that lower education crap. I click bc ads interest me. So do these people.

5) Theglobe - didn't they become a major spam company? I read that somewhere legit...

6) On the judges' broad interpretation: Seems like bad law. Just focusing on results. I'd guess that either they get overruled/differentiated a lot or that the anti-spam legislation gets broadened beyond IAPs, which really means internet service providers (like the jerks trying to kill Net Neutrality).

7) "The Court said that RMGâ€™s attorneys failed to argue anything about â€œThe Four Factorsâ€ defining fair use (Doh! They forgot to â€˜proof-upâ€™ their argument!)" It kills me when I read decisions like that. Gotta love these bumblers, for comic relief if nothing else.

Agreed. That's why I'm glad that companies with buckets of money bring these cases that develop the case law.

The rest of us cannot afford the warchest it takes to bring a case to ruling and judgment. We have to give in and settle early. And that deprives the Courts the opportunity to develop the law.

Undeveloped law means that doing a risk assessment is more difficult. Thus, it's harder to know when to gamble on trying your case in court. This in turn leads to more settlements. So its a vicious cycle. Thank god for deep pockets.

[I realize that it's not easy to read on the screen, but there is a considerable chunk of sarcasm in this comment. And a spoonful of truth too.]

In every business there will be those that bend and break the rules in order to try to get ahead, and it sucks that it always bites the rest of us in the rear. They have no concern for the long term possibilities of SEM, they just want to make a buck because the opportunity is there.

I am happy to see however that the courts seem to want to put a stop to it at least to some degree. I have always felt that the laws that regulate the net were either full of holes or just plain did not exist, but I then I catch myself and give myself a reminder of the fact that this is all relatively new. In the grand scheme of things the internet hasnt even been around that long, and certainly the idea that it has actually become a marketplace?!?!...

I guess all I am saying is that the winds of change are still blowing, and we all are going to play a role in how this thing shapes up. Let's just do good, honest work, and this industry will thrive.